Blast From The Past...sort Of....

[jbolt]

This is the fisrt CNC controller I built many years ago. I do not remember exactly when that was. Maybe 15 years ago? It was for a small CNC router that never got built.

I dug it out of storage to see if I could still use it. It's kind of scary that I remember building this but not any of the details of why I did what I did or where I sourced the parts. I do remember having powered up the driver power supply and the computer. I also remember at the time I was concerned about interference between the PC and power supply being so close together but never got any further.

I am pleased that I did a neat wiring job! Check out the floppy drive! I'm not even sure if the MB will support Mach3.

Anyway, I need to figure out which gecko drivers these are and if I can find any info on the BOB. Any idea?

Jay

 

[jbolt]

I was able to track down the person I got the BOB from and he referred me to the original designer/manufacturer. The Sound Logic board was made around 2000/2001. Neither had a manual but I did find a manual for a later revision that has more features. Not much to say about the one I have other than it is for up to 4 axis, will handle 4 relay inputs from an auxiliary broad and has 12v power & inputs for proximity sensors as home/limits.

The Geckodrives are very early 201's from the same time period. I'm not sure why the drives came without covers but they must have cost less at the time.

I had some time over the weekend to go through the control box. All the wiring was done correctly except I had grounded the disable pin on the gecko's to one of the NC terminals on the contractor. I'm not sure why this was done but it must have been on the advice of someone. After removing these wires the drives powered up.

Not shown in the pictures are the NEMA 23 PowerMaxII steppers that I got around the same time. At 214 oz-in, the steppers may be too small for the small router I am planning. Also the power supply only puts out 34vdc. Hopefully this will be sufficient. I can read the transformer label to figure out how many amps it puts out.

The motherboard is a pentuimII 266mhz w/a blistering 128mb of ram and a fresh install of windows 98. The specs are too slow for the minimum requirements for Mach3. I asked around the neighborhood and scored two HP business machines with win xp pro. P4, 2.8ghz, 2g ram so I swaped that out, did a fresh install of xp and loaded Mach3.

Wired up the motors, configured Mach 3 and everything powered up and moved as it should.